In this significant contribution to nineteenth-century German religious history, as well as to comparative studies of Pietism and Evangelicalism, Andrew Kloes offers one of the first English-language surveys and interpretations of the German Awakening (die Erweckungsbewegung), the predominantly Protestant religious revival in central Europe during the decades following the Napoleonic Wars. While a rich scholarly literature on the Awakening exists in German, comparatively little is available in English. Kloes synthesizes much of this German-language scholarship while offering his own interpretation of the Awakening, which builds upon Hartmut Lehmann's description of Protestant revival movements as responses to successive waves of secularization (or “de-Christianization”) within Europe. Throughout the book, Kloes foregrounds the German Awakening leaders’ critique of de-Christianization—which they attributed chiefly to the influence of enlightened Protestant rationalism—and their strategic efforts to re-Christianize German society through coordinated evangelistic and social activism. He shows how these re-Christianization efforts were thoroughly modern, enabled by the same social transformations that contributed to secularization. In so doing, Kloes's interpretation of the Awakening undermines any simplistic identification of modernity and secularity, showing the ways that the structural transformations of modernity also fostered religious revival.
Kloes first develops his argument by analyzing the content of the Awakening's message, and then in later chapters attends to the institutional forms of the movement. He begins with two chapters that employ Reinhart Koselleck's method of “conceptual history” to examine the concept of “awakening” in earlier periods of German Protestantism (including the Reformation and Pietism) and as Awakened Protestants deployed the concept in the first half of the nineteenth century. After this, Kloes turns to the preachers and academic theologians who constructed the Awakening's message in their preaching, teaching, and publications. Through biographical sketches of these leaders in their local contexts, Kloes brings to the fore the historical consciousness of the Awakened. In response to a rationalistic Protestantism that the Awakened believed had corrupted the churches and theological faculties in the decades after the Enlightenment, they understood themselves as “resurrecting” a pure Protestant gospel, recovering and continuing the Pietist tradition of Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke as well as the Reformation tradition.
In the latter half of the book, Kloes examines a host of institutions promoted by leaders of the Awakening in order to show how agents of Awakening adopted new and distinctively modern means of social organization to accomplish their mission of religious renewal. The first of these two chapters examines institutions such as the Prussian Central Bible Society, formed by the Awakened for the purposes of evangelistic missions, both foreign and domestic. The second chapter examines a subsequent wave of societies founded for the purpose of social amelioration in response to urbanization, population growth, and the effects of war and famine. In both chapters, Kloes demonstrates how these voluntary religious societies rationalized evangelistic and reform activity by centralizing funding and coordinating efforts among the laity of the emerging middle class (Bürgertum).
Kloes draws together his arguments in a conclusion that characterizes the Awakening as marked by five features. First, the Awakening affirmed traditional Protestant orthodoxy, resisting Enlightenment doctrinal innovations. Second, it was pietistic, seeking the renewal of the Protestant churches through spiritual edification and activism among the laity. Third, it was ecumenical, overcoming historic confessional divisions to find common cause among those who shared a commitment to basic tenants of the Christian message. Fourth, it was a transnational movement, forging connections with similarly oriented Protestants abroad (especially Great Britain). And finally, the Awakening was distinctively modern in the ways that its leaders among the Bürgertum made use of new civic freedoms and institutions to achieve their goals.
On a few of these points, Kloes's study invites further questions. For instance, the ecumenism so evident among many of the Awakening's leaders seemed in tension with other aspects of the movement. Kloes lists among the theological schools generated by the Awakening in academic theology a “modern confessional” theology—exemplified by Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg and Adolf von Harless—that sought to recover and reformulate Lutheran confessional orthodoxy in distinction to other Protestant confessions. In describing the founding of missionary seminaries, Kloes notes that Protestants in Saxony founded a Lutheran seminary in Dresden in 1836 because they found another seminary tied to the Awakening (in Basel) “insufficiently Lutheran, in terms of its doctrinal emphases” (184). Given Olaf Blaschke's characterization of the nineteenth century as a “second age of confessionalization” in Germany, in what ways did the Awakening challenge such confessionalization, in what ways may it have contributed to it, and did this change over time (“Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 [2000]: 38–75)? Likewise, Kloes rightly highlights the international partners and analogous revival movements to the Awakening that occurred outside of central Europe, including in Britain and the United States. Further comparative and transnational analyses of these movements can highlight the ways that the German Awakening was an instance of a general type of awakening throughout the North Atlantic world, and in what ways its German context made it distinct. Kloes's study is an important step in bridging the Anglophone and German-language scholarship that will make such comparative work possible in the future.
